Wonder if it's possible to have a 'NATO like' alliance among the smaller companies that pools the resource together to fight patent trolls, and basically make it clear that these are the companies that will never settle with you, and will utilize pooled resource to fight against the patent trolls to the end.
We all hate patent trolls so much because there's no way to know whose patents we're violating before we get sued. But there are also cases where, whether or not we approve of the patent, everyone at least knows it exists. Like Apple patenting magnetic laptop chargers. Everyone knows that if you start selling a MagSafe competitor, Apple is going to sue you.
So one of the problems you have to solve if you create a NATO-like network of companies, is that one of your members might decide they want to go up against Apple. Now your organization has to decide what counts as a "troll" case and what counts as "you should've known". And since some industries are at a higher risk of trolling than others, those more expensive members will inevitably drive out the safer members who foot the bills but don't benefit very much.
So in the end you have problems somewhere in between an insurance company and...NATO :p
In general, "patent troll" refers to NPEs - Non Practicing Entities - companies that don't produce/manufacture/sell anything (except patent licences).
Most companies avoid patent litigation in all but the most severe instances, because so many people hold patents for the most obvious of things that they might well get counter-sued by the company they're suing. Mutually Assured Destruction in patent form.
NPEs don't have this concern, so they can send out all sorts of dubious claims without fear of countersuit.
An alliance against NPEs (with a rule preventing NPEs from joining) might well be worthwhile.
How do you sue a genuine NPE (just a patent holding company with lawyers) over patent infringement? Because that's going to be your only counterweapon, beyond funding litigation for members.
But, I mean, NATO must also make very similar decisions, right?
If a NATO nation gets 'attacked' by somewhat provoking a war, NATO must ultimately make some sort of decision about whether or not to jointly act (and foot the bill).
Yes but the treaty itself is pretty precise. You can look at it, but basically : if it is not a direct attack on the North Atlantic country sovereign soil, NATO do not have to do anything.
What software is even patentable anymore? Some light reading of articles and wikipedia[0] makes it appear that post-Alice Supreme Court ruling anything mathematical, or anything that is an abstract idea implemented by a computer, is not patentable. I'm struggling to think of what is left. Cryptography is pure math, as is data compression. Is a specific type of UI patentable?
Alice/Mayo are more complicated than that. Those cases lay out a two-step process:
(1) Is the patent directed at an abstract idea or law of nature? If not, it is subject-matter eligible.
(2) If the patent is directed at an abstract idea, does the patent add any "inventive concept" so that the patent isn't just an attempt to monopolize the abstract idea itself? For purposes of this second step, simply performing the abstract idea on a computer is insufficient. If the patent adds something extra, it's subject-matter eligible.
"Abstract idea" almost certainly means something narrower to the courts than it does to many programmers. The Supreme Court declined the opportunity in Alice to rule that all algorithms are abstract ideas that are patent ineligible.
Say I come up with a circuit that controls engine timing to minimize emissions. If I use an electronic circuit, that's definitely patentable. Under broad definitions of "abstract idea," if I replace the circuit with a general purpose processor, then suddenly that's not patentable. The Supreme Court has tried very hard to avoid that result. Something isn't patent eligible just because you run it on a computer, but something also isn't patent-ineligible just because it runs on a computer.
Thanks for your detailed response. I'm still confused unfortunately. So my algorithm needs something more that is subject-matter specific. As a contrived example, let's say I take the quicksort algorithm. If I add something extra, like quicksort applied to data objects tagged in a very specific way that I design, that could then be a patent?
To be fair, the Supreme Court's standard is pretty confusing!
As to your example, I suspect he answer is still "no." It's not enough to just "add something" to the abstract idea--the thing you add has to have an "inventive concept." Field of use limitations ("quicksort to sort birthdays") or post-solution activity ("quicksort then you do something else") do not make the abstract idea patentable. Routine activity--and arguably, adapting algorithms to different data formats is routine in programming--aren't sufficient either.
One thing that's left unsaid in the cases but that matters in practice is that the patent has to "seem like a real invention" that produces a useful result. Courts deny that they do this, but post-Alice there has been a tendency to inject elements of obviousness and novelty into the issue of patentability. If your algorithm doesn't seem like it was hard to come up with, or it just produces numbers that are not directly useful to the end user, it's going to get labeled "abstract idea."
E.g. consider an algorithm for distributed reference counting. That'll get dinged as an abstract idea. However, if you come up with a way to manage image/video resources in a distributed cache that happens to use a distributed reference counting algorithm, that might pass muster.
Finally, the law has changed a lot in the last 6-7 years. But there are still lots of patents out there from back when the law was laxer that are getting litigated (and often invalidated in light of Alice).
If you weren't confused then something would be wrong. People in the industry get confused by this subject matter eligibility stuff. Alice's tests are pretty vague and leave a lot up to individual judgement on the merits of each case. It's hard to give hard and fast rules.
That said, it's hard to say that any other jurisdiction has a far simpler or better test for software implemented inventions. It's just a hard question.
One of the main issues is, despite that decision, the USPTO is understaffed and underfunded, so stuff will still get patented that should have no grounds for patentability.
I think the reasoning is that understaffing means each examiner can't spend as much time looking for prior art, so things might be patented that should have been rejected by a lengthier prior art search.
The USPTO would still have an obligation to process the patent applications though. So now each patent has an average of 4h20m spent on it instead of 4h40m (some are hundreds of pages of complex concepts that potentially no one in the world has seen published before).
The examiner then would be under pressure to glance over a lot of applications and just let the courts sort it out later.
I'd like to know how he financed the court fights. All from NewEgg profits? Did they manage to get financial contributions from other companies that had a vested interest in fighting the trolls?
write letters to your senator. Done enmass, this can really change their mind - if they see their electorate care, they are going to add the angle to their campaign. Make sure you vote, and also remember, democracy is slow and painful.
In my mind, the most fair would be something that didn't grant a monopoly on an idea to one player.
I don't think rewarding patent owners is a goal, except that we already decided the way to reward inventors was patents and selling them (perhaps to those that can realize the value better, build a product and market it etc).
My question is where are the inventors that want a patent system of any sort?
I was under the impression that patents are a tool for lawyers and wealthy corporations to collect fees and maintain monopolies respectively.
What inventor wants to patent their idea and why do they want to do such an awful thing?
> My question is where are the inventors that want a patent system of any sort?
I spent the early part of my career at a startup working on cognitive radio technology. Basically, algorithms to allow radios to use spectrum opportunistically, and to allow networks of such radios to maintain connectivity while dynamically changing radio channels.
Like everyone else in that field, our company patented its inventions. It's expensive paying roomfuls of PhDs to work on network algorithms. At the same time, cognitive radios are not a consumer product you can launch overnight to a billion people. It's not a market where first-mover advantage or network effects have any value. It's not a market where you can hide your "secret sauce" behind a web API. In fact, you usually have to deliver source to your customers. It takes years to get into the market, and competitors waiting for you to do all the work and reverse engineering your design would eliminate any possible return on investment.
Moreover, as a startup we had no expertise in manufacturing radios. Nor did it make any sense for us to get into that business--there are tons of companies that have the manufacturing expertise to build those radios. We could never compete with them on that front. The idea was always to develop the technology, then sell it to someone whose expertise was building radios.
> where are the inventors that want a patent system of any sort?
To me, this parallels the question: where are the artists that want a copyright system of any sort?
The consensus seems to be that automation will abolish most drudgery over the next few generations. Won't the succeeding economy be founded exactly on creative and inventive intellectual labor? The intellectual property system as we know it may not be the mechanism to support it, but it seems like there should be some way of identifying and rewarding creators and inventors.
A patent is a time-limited monopoly, granted as recompense for publishing the details of their invention.
Inventors can profit from their invention by selling products, and keeping the invention details a Trade Secret. For example, Coca-Cola is protected as trade secret, rather than by patent.
Naturally this is less useful for something that can be reverse-engineered fairly easily, like, say, something in tech.
What inventor wants to patent their idea and why do they want to do such an awful thing?
These days, I think it's mostly out of fear of being sued by another patent-holder. Companies often stockpile patents to maintain the deterrence of Mutually Assured Destruction.
They will tell you, “you know the cost of litigation is this number”. Which I unfortunately know the cost of litigation is like that. “All we are asking for is a percentage of that cost and then the risk of punitive damages will go away”
It still amazes me that extortion via lawsuit is legal.
What does a group spewing incorrect non-sense about reality have to do with morality?
Many times these groups takes immortal stances because of their detachment from reality. For example there is a huge correlation in people who don't care about the suffering global warming causes and religion. Its not really hard to understand either, many modern day american think Jesus will come in their lifetime, so why bother caring about 100 years from now.
It even works for things directly against rules in the book. Churchgoers are more likely to be for the death penalty even "thou shall not kill" is most of those religious books.
I am not saying all religious people are bad, just that religion does not filter out bad people or bad behavior effectively.
It's tough to say things like this in public, because so many people feel so strongly about their religious beliefs (I'm sure if I had any I'd feel strongly about them too).
But, the idea that morality is tied to or because of religion is, erm, pure applesauce. To me, morality appears to be the moving zeitgeist of opinions on what makes a proper society.
At the risk of derailing this topic, the concept we have of privacy as a moral issue is likely to change as well. The common current idea (which I hold as well, please don't misunderstand) is that one's personal privacy, especially as related to communication, is sacrosanct.
But, in a world where it's getting easier and easier to just not give a shit about that and (generally, for 99.9% of the population's personal lives) have no ill effects, people are going to care less and less about data privacy and security, and the zeitgeist will shift.
I think that it will be the defining issue of the 21st century, and I have no idea how things will look coming out the other end.
If that zeitgeisty soft morality issue changes I pray to god that our acceptance of flaws and realistic human behaviour from our political class changes too.
Because in a world with no privacy, the only people who are going to be squeaky clean are thoae whose lives have been curated from day 1, either through privilege and iron-fisted parent s or through single-mindedness verging on psychosis.
> If that zeitgeisty soft morality issue changes I pray to god that our acceptance of flaws and realistic human behaviour from our political class changes too.
Most countries aside from the USA are pretty blase about their politicians' personal behavior and morality. It's this silly idea that politicians should be paragons of personal virtue, independent of their public and political virtues, that gets the US in such hypocritical binds.
Not really. There's a threshold where the outcome of an algorithm isn't predictable by the programmer. That threshold is much lower than mildly strong AI. As an example of a comparatively simple algorithm, Notch didn't know where the mountains, caves, oceans would be in the billions of Minecraft worlds - only some of their properties and distribution.
If AI programmers determined the AIs' decisions, that would negate the point of AI.
I can easily write a bunch of code you can't readily predict the outcome to but I can predict with 100% certainty. The easiest way is to cheat and inject code you don't readily see: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheKenThompsonHack
> one's personal privacy, especially as related to communication, is sacrosanct
Privacy is a fairly modern invention. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think it assumes too much to take the concept of sacrosanct privacy as axiomatic.
My whole point is that it is not axiomatic, or fundamental, in any way. Instead, it's a consequence of the zeitgeist :) and because of that, I see it disappearing over the course of the coming century.
Given that you made a link between killing and abortion, it was pretty obvious that you were against abortion. Pro abortion people do not believe abortion is killing anyone.
If you read up on the way it is practiced there is a fat chance you will see the link as well. (Hint, they aren't always dead when they come out. Recently (2 years ago IIRC) even nurses who work with this day in and day out started objecting to the practice because as they said; it is completely crazy that on one room they are fighting to save the life of a premature child and on the next they are throwing a towel over an equally old babys face so their mom won't hear it crying before they finally bleed out/and or suffocate.)
Also : we are way off topic and I don't want to continue this thread.
These episodes could only happen in late-stage abortions which are very rare. You can call it murder but that doesn't inform the debate about abortion in general.
The way I read it the parent comment portrayed all abortions to be of this type. ("If you read up on the way it is practiced there is a fat chance you will see the link as well.") To me there is a big difference between the original "abortion is murder" and your "this rare form of abortion is murder."
>> The way I read it the parent comment portrayed all abortions to be of this type.
Clarification since there is a misunderstanding about my understanding: No, I know most of them are not this type. I also think there is a difference between late and early although I personally would advice against both. I am not a lawmaker though.
A little background: yes, I grew up in a pro life family and while I was always personally against I didn't really start bothering until that piece of news struck me from one of the major newspapers that day. Knowing this kind of cruelty actually happens on a more or less regular basis (well known by nurses even in the small country I live in) and on the scale of 88/day * botch_factor it is now hard not to care.
That said, yes, from a pragmatic perspective just getting rid of most of those 32000 late ones would be mighty good. I would believe a number of you could agree with that.
There is now and has been for some time a somewhat healthy debate around death penalty. Unfortunately IMO it seems that the right to kill innocent children before (or, if necessary because procedure failed, after ) birth is somehow sacred and cannot be discussed publicly.
On the other hand, people who go to the church are more likely to give to charity, or participate in their community… It seems religion is doing some things right.
Charitable activity provides a lot of political cover for really shitty religiously motivated behavior. For example, giving money to the Salvation Army is probably a net-negative effect on the world.
It funds anti-homosexual political activity, attaches onerous religious proselytization to their poverty outreach, subsidizes in-your-face guilt-tripping bell ringers, crowds out other anti-poverty efforts, and reduces the charitable effort that donators bring to more worthwhile causes.
It's not literally the worst charity - that probably belongs to Susan G. Komen - but it is pretty terrible.
How bigoted I am is completely irrelevant as to how terrible the Salvation Army is. I'd much rather learn why you think my beliefs about the Salvation Army are wrong, or why you think my beliefs about what constitutes "good" are wrong.
Well, I'm a Christian, so that probably answers your question. If you want to talk more specifically, I'd be happy to.
But while I'm sure I don't agree with everything the SA does or all of its methods (keeping in mind that it's a huge organization, spread around the world, with many different chapters, people, etc--so it's not like a monolithic organization where everyone walks and talks the same), I certainly recognize the enormous good they have done throughout their history.
For you to say that their work is a net-negative is quite shameful.
First of all, I said that giving them more money is net-negative. That's a very different thing than their work being net-negative.
Second, the Salvation Army isn't responsible for all the good they have done. They're responsible for the difference in what would have been done if they didn't exist, compared to what they did. This difference is some combination of converting poverty-relief effort into evangelical christian proselytization and changing how much effort gets spent relieving poverty. The relative moral weights of these is an open question that is completely un-answered by knowing how much total poverty relief they do.
Like, if you choose to become a doctor, you shouldn't get kudos for every life you save. You should get kudos for every life that got saved because you chose to become a doctor instead of your next best option. Other people would have been doctors if you weren't interested, and other doctors would have treated your cases if you weren't a doctor. The good that a choice does can only be measured in terms of opportunity costs.
Finally, I'm never going to feel ashamed to say what I think is right. No matter what. If donating to the Salvation Army makes the world a worse place, I want to say that donating to the Salvation Army makes the world a worse place. If it doesn't, then I don't want to say it. If I'm wrong, help me understand how I'm wrong. If you just want to suppress an opinion because it's a particular kind of opinion, fuck you.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Christ commanded his followers to go into the world and make disciples, teaching them everything that He commanded. Paul wrote that people have different gifts, lending some to teaching and such more than others, but making disciples and spreading the good news is more than knocking on doors or handing out pamphlets; quietly living a faithful life is also a form of evangelizing. After all, you know that they are Christians, so I suppose they aren't keeping it entirely to themselves, right? However, Jesus said that, those who are ashamed of him, he will be ashamed of. So I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by keeping to themselves.
Well, if what's written in the Bible is true--if God is real, and Jesus did come and die for all people, and there is an afterlife coming for everyone, and those who have not washed their sins away will not enter into eternal life--then it's the most relevant thing in the world.
And Jesus did not tell his disciples, "If someone asks you about me, tell them." He said to go and teach. Paul didn't walk into the agora and wait for someone to ask him, "Excuse me, just curious, but which god do you worship?" He started conversations with people and sought those who would hear.
For some people it might involve door-knocking or handing out pamphlets. For others it might mean living a faithful, godly life on a daily basis, in all interactions with people--or to put it in biblical terms, being salt and light, and being in the world but not of it--setting an example that will pique others' interest and provide opportunities to share the gospel. It might mean volunteering for charity work, helping those in need. It might mean traveling to a foreign country and doing mission work.
Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 12 about spiritual gifts and the members of the body each serving their own function. We're not all called to be preachers or teachers or missionaries, etc. We are all called to use the gifts we're given. The parable of the talents in Matthew 25 is an example of this as well.
Jesus was the new kid on the block when he said that, but in most modern western countries the "good news" isn't news.
People who stand on street corners with "ask me about Jesus" signs are passive, different from actively knocking on doors; people don't even like when corporate salespeople do that.
I'm not going to discuss the other things here, a general discussion on religion is beyond the scope of this thread I think, but needless to say, there's a great variation of interpretation between the group labelled "Christian".
> needless to say, there's a great variation of interpretation between the group labelled "Christian".
Yes, there certainly is. But the question is, are they following Christ? Just because they say they are or think they are doesn't necessarily mean that they are. One must look to what Christ said and taught. He said, among many things, that a tree is known by its fruit, and a good tree does not bear bad fruit; and that, in the judgment, many will say, "Lord, didn't we do great things in your name?" and he will say to some of them, "Away from me, I never knew you."
Not everyone who claims to be a Christian is one, and not everyone who believes in Christ is following him. It's up to each person to study the scriptures and follow Christ to the best of their understanding.
"Going to church" can be said to be a form of "Participating in their community", so this looks like it might be a tautology presented to paint church-goers in a positive light.
"Giving to charity" is not necessarily a good thing. Before giving to a charity, a person ought to skeptically evaluate the charity. Many charities exist to exploit our desire to feel good about ourselves while benefiting those who run the charity. People who don't apply skeptical thinking are easy targets.
If our goal is to use our money to make the world a better place, in some cases it may in fact be better to invest in a local small business than to give to charity.
The curious thing is that patent trolls exist at all because lawyers are so expensive. The reason almost no company can afford to fight patent trolls is because the legal costs are so expensive.
On a related note, I also find it incredible how people can make a living out of these kind of businesses and sleep well at night...
Seems like a business opportunity to me. If you can get people who are being sued by these people to buy patent troll insurance and pool the resources you could out resource the Patient Troll and make a profit.
If I remember, that's one of the things Cheng has done. He tries to find companies currently facing threats from the same troll and share costs to drive the price of a suit under the (summed) price of settlement.
There's no real way for the defenders to make a profit, since getting damages out of the troll is basically impossible. And unfortunately, that means that even with pooled resources, trolls are purely a drag on the economy. But at least this way, they tend to lose and stop being a drag for the next guy.
there is actually no way to get money from them. Most of them know what they are doing. They will setup an empty corporation thats only assets is the patent and then hire themselves as legal counsel for the corporation who gets paid 100% of the proceeds from any lawsuit so the company never has any money. If they lose a lawsuit their patent will be invalidated and have 0 assets so there is nothing to take from them if you try to collect damages in a counter suit, they will just declare bankruptcy and fold the corporation and make a new one
If the only reason the company exists is to file frivolous or bad faith lawsuits a judge can hold the corporate officers personally liable. Increasingly there are anti patent troll laws being passed that allow a patent holder to receive statutory damages.
Losing more frequently than willing could shift the economics away from trolling. Even better would be court sanctions and/or having to pay defendants fees.
Absolutely, and we might be starting to see that - I'm just mad that it's still purely negative for the defenders.
Of course, it's hard because paying the opponent's fees opens up other kinds of abuse. If you get sued by Coca Cola, you can't just judge what lawyer you can afford, you have to realize that even a small decision against you could come with the million dollars in costs they paid to take the thing to court. I don't really know a good answer to "litigation is expensive, and that produces abuse".
Sanctions or frequent invalidation of patents would be great, though. One other thing I would love to see is a change to the choice-of-venue rules - this would be less of a problem if we weren't seeing every case fought in East Texas where summary judgement is impossible to get.
There's got to be something like that possible. If nothing else Newegg has been reaping some rewards from very publicly fighting these cases and gaining good will.
If the government can't put together competent reforms, maybe they could put up some money to reward people who get bad patents struck down? Hell, maybe some percentage of infringement winnings could be directed into a reward pool for patent strikedowns.
It'd decrease the overall value of patents, but I'm pretty ok with that.
If /s means sarcasm and you are correct, then GP is intending the opposite of what they say. That unsignalled irony will be missed by 95% of readers, and is probably ill-advised. I certainly didn't pick up on it, and I'm usually decent at that.
Depends on your sense of morals, I am sure there are many NSA employees who sleep well at night.
Many people follow what I call Godfather's I ethics. Vito Corleone cares about his family and friends and will do rather mean things to those who threaten the well being of those around him.
Tribalism has stayed with us over the millennia and is unlikely to go away any time soon.
Why would that be amazing? Another set of rules to be co-opted and exploited against their fellows must be like catnip for this type of personality. Its the first place I'd go looking for them.
Remember that the Jesus that they claim today was so unpopular for showing up at their churches and throwing down with exactly that type of personality in his day that they had him killed.
And it is the same Jesus that the rest of Christianity claim.
Of course it is bad, even ugly, when someone who has pledged to be follow Christ is an @$$, but do not however try to pretend like Christianity is what causes it.
For any so-called Christian scumbag there is an even worse non-believer, just read up on the reign of terror or the various communist regimes. (And don't get me started on mainstream Christinity and its refusal to, - and I quote "Teaching them to observe all things whatever I have commanded you[...]")
I think we probably agree. Christianity is not the cause. But churches (and the legalism and hypocrisy within) sure can be by providing "moral cover" for bad behavior.
If the Christians followed Christ everything would be great. The first thing Christ did was head for the church, point out the legalism and say "you're doing it all wrong."
I possibly agree more with a number of you than with a number of churchgoers yes, even if I am very much something like that myself (meaning I am a whole lot less tied to specific buildings and more to those I know that do practice it the way I do).
That Jesus was quite radical in a number of ways though, all the way from being way stricter than the religious elite at the time ("It has been said... But I say to you...", going above and beyond what was commonly thought to be good behavior and into what people even today think is close to impossible), to pointing out how their hypocrisy was wrong - to then go ahead and die for them(!), so almost by definition the life of anyone who honestly tries to follow his teachings are still today quite unlike anything that passes for normal.
That said I mostly don't bother anyone else with it, hoping instead that if my life stands out in a good way, those who are interested might ask.
I do however defend my faith, I won't let people thrash the thing that has turned my and so many others life around for the better. That is the least I can do.
...amazingly, think of themselves as good people. They even go to church, amazingly enough.
Why would going to church be evidence that they are good people?
Look at how people act, not what they say. When you look at crime rates, divorce statistics, and so on, atheists seem to behave more morally than evangelical Christians.
I guess my point is never underestimate "incentive-caused bias"
Take that a step farther. When you already believe yourself to be a worthless sinner who has a blank check of forgiveness from Jesus, what incentive do you have to not act like a worthless sinner?
> Why would going to church be evidence that they are good people?
I've heard from a Skepticon talk that some studies show that it is. They give more to charity, participate more in their communities, things like that.
At the very least, going to Church is most probably evidence that one is either striving to be a good person or already think of themselves as good persons. That last hypothesis would explain how they can sleep at night.
> Take that a step farther. When you already believe yourself to be a worthless sinner who has a blank check of forgiveness from Jesus, what incentive do you have to not act like a worthless sinner?
Aren't you supposed to make amends first? At the very least, show some contrition, and promise you won't do it again?
According to Sola Fide[0], faith is the only thing that matters for going to the "good place" or the "bad place". So no, you are not supposed to make amends and promise not to do it again to go to the "good place".
Now to not strawman the argument, it is more complex than that. The wiki link does an OK job explaining some of it.
ISTR looking into the divorce statistics once, and mostly finding articles that (through malice or stupidity) compared divorce rates per capita, instead of per marriage. Evangelicals had a higher divorce rate than atheists, but married evangelicals had a lower rate.
If you identify evangelical Christians by self-identification, my statement is clearly true. Digging into the difference between self-identification and religious practice is not something that I saw before, and is a fascinating data point.
Like I warned about in my sibling comment, the map is comparing divorce rates per capita, not per marriage. It does not say what you claim. (Also, eyeballing it I couldn't even tell you whether the south has an unusually high divorce rate per capita. It's an awful presentation of the wrong data.)
The bar chart is comparing divorce rates per marriage, and does not find that religious affiliation affects divorce rate; but churchgoing does, at least in some religious groups.
I don't see why this would be amazing. Many terrible people go to church. Some even use it as a form of moral self licensing to rationalize doing evil.
If you actually believe in the moral correctness of the law being used, I don't think that's actually wrong, is it? "You are breaking this law. You and I will both spend a bunch of money getting the courts to stop you from doing it. Instead, you can choose to stop doing it and settle with my firm for the cost of tracking you down, which is strictly preferable for everyone involved."
(I hold this opinion weakly, so please argue me out of it if it's dumb.)
Most of the time laws are designed to prevent vigilantism, because vigilantes are not accountable to society and the punishments they give may be disproportionate or self-serving. Enforcing laws through private suits sounds a lot like officially sanctioned vigilantism, and points to a failure of the legal system.
> Most of the time laws are designed to prevent vigilantism
That's quite a claim! I also don't see how that doesn't apply to virtually every law surrounding civil cases. If I pay for a service and you don't give it to me, I have to sue you. Why is that any less like officially sanctioned vigilantism than if I sue you over patent claims? Do you also advocate breach of contract being made legal?
I think that tactic makes a lot of sense when it's being applied to good laws. Like, "hey, you know you violated our XYZ contract here, and you know that if we go to court you're going to have to pay me $X, so why don't you just pay me slightly-less-than-$X now and we both save ourselves the trouble." That helps everyone involved. In a sense, all contracts and obligations work that way.
The real problem is that laws are complicated and variably enforced, making it extremely unclear who is right. Thus high legal fees.
The legal system is worse than the shittiest legacy code base you have ever seen, composed almost entirely of buggy exceptions, written with no thought toward future maintainers, beyond the comprehension of any mortal man, and gluing centuries old defunctness to poorly conceived addendum patching over the peeling layers. No one has interested in remove features, just adding more to the mountain of rubble.
> The legal system is worse than the shittiest legacy code base you have ever seen
You haven't seen the legacy code I have. One of the apps I worked on was modelling financial legal agreements. That was some truly shitty code. One function was over 50 printed pages with indentation levels I can't even begin to describe. It was also C++ written like Java. Tons of new's - no deletes or use of smart pointers. Leaked memory like you would not believe. Thankfully it was a batch-process. Even then, the server it ran on was allocated more that 128 GB of RAM because the hardware was cheaper than fixing the software.
As for fairness: loser pays disincentivizes bringing lawsuits, whether meritless or meritorious. Under loser pays, certain frivolous lawsuits would not be brought, but meritorious cases that are often uphill battles would not be brought either. If you're in the business of going after polluters (like the Sierra Club), or challenging national security policies (like the EFF), the law is not on your side, even if your cause is just.
As a practical matter, you can't just take the English rule and import it into the U.S. Europe is an "ask for permission first" place, while the U.S. is "ask for forgiveness later." That allows U.S. companies to move faster, but puts the legal system in the position of being a backstop for unsafe products, financial fraud, pollution, unfairness in hiring, etc. So for example, it would be unfair to make it untenable for individuals to bring lawsuits for wrongful termination without giving them the protections against arbitrary dismissal European workers enjoy.[1]
Much of the support for loser-pays in the U.S. is an attempt by businesses to have their cake and eat it too. They don't want plaintiffs lawyers' bringing privacy lawsuits, but they're not exactly clamoring for that system to be replaced with European-style data protection laws administered by regulatory agencies.
[1] Which model is more efficient is debatable. I think in areas where causation is difficult to prove (environmental, product safety, employment discrimination), "ask for permission first" does a better job protecting the public at lower cost. But it also gives tremendous additional power to the government to micromanage the economy.
A lot of complaints about the legal system seem centered around particular cases where things seem unfair, but it's important to bear in mind that the legal system as a whole tries to optimize multiple, sometimes-contradictory objectives, and every design choice represents a tradeoff.
* The tradeoff between discouraging frivolous lawsuits vs. discouraging legitimate lawsuits is one case
* Another common complaint is that laws and regulations are complex and inscrutable -- but the tradeoff is that a simpler, shorter law will be more ambiguous and therefore actually less predictable in practice until it's been thoroughly litigated
Sometimes it surprises me that professional software engineers deal with systems design tradeoffs every day in their own work, but then fail to see that systems design logic also applies to human institutions.
> Sometimes it surprises me that professional software engineers deal with systems design tradeoffs every day in their own work, but then fail to see that systems design logic also applies to human institutions.
I think it's because the equilibriums look much worse. Even if your system is a pile of hacks on top of hacks, it might at least be good enough right now. Not to mention that sometimes you engineer something that works pretty well. Meanwhile the legal system often fails even for the exact situations considered when the rules were made, and there's pretty much no one would feel there isn't some gross injustice happening within it quite frequently (though the injustice may vary).
You could always award reasonable costs to the winner in patent law cases though. You don't have to fix the whole legal system in one go.
Interesting to see you advocate for "ask forgiveness later", one could render that as "if you're rich the legislature is happy as long as you give it a cut". You might as well ditch all corporate application of the law and just increase business taxes, same result but more economical.
I'm pretty sure I said: "I think in areas where causation is difficult to prove (environmental, product safety, employment discrimination), 'ask for permission first' does a better job protecting the public at lower cost."
It's a mistake to blame the rules. Litigation in USA is mostly supply-driven. We have several times the number of attorneys that a society like ours can safely have. The profession of law has created this surplus, and the rest of the nation hasn't reined them in. The only effective solutions would be Shakespearean.
I suppose it probably affects the total amount of litigation. If both parties know they will have to pay their own attorneys fees I'd expect less money to be spent on attorney's fees overall. That might also mean less time spent in court. If it does, perhaps that would be seen as good for the legal system (the courts themselves)?
I haven't checked the stats, but I don't think that there's less litigation in the US compared to other western countries, so if that was the aim it seems to have failed.
Suppose you want to sue Megacorp over a few thousand dollars. You're 95% confident of winning, but if you lose, you need to pay Megacorp's legal fees. Megacorp's legal fees are always going to be high, but they can make them even higher than necessary (good luck regulating this), perhaps to the point where if you lose, you're bankrupt.
Result: no one sues Megacorp for small amounts of money. Megacorp can get away with lots of things that they would otherwise be sued for.
(I don't know if this happens in reality, but I do think it's a legit thing to worry about.)
But in practice, in the UK f.e., actual costs aren't awarded but instead a scale of reasonable costs is set.
That way Megacorp can hire 100 barristers if they want but if you lose you pay ordinary levels of costs. It might still bankrupt an individual but Megacorp can't just financially pressure all opponents in giving up in cases when Megacorp will obviously lose no matter who represents them in court.
Also, Small Claims (which I think USA has too), has very limited awards of costs, I'd usually contended just on paper and covers small charges. Allowing you to sue Megacorp by filling out a simple form and not even enlisting a lawyer.
A system with an assumption of awarding reasonable costs seems most preferable.
Just going to brainstorm some ideas, without really being attached to them:
1. The English system doesn't necessarily protect a litigant. A well funded patent troll or a poorly funded but well meaning patent violator is now potentially on the hook for both damages and attorney fees. This is especially problematic when the law favors the accuser (as it seems to do in the American patent system).
2. It's a system that favors the "big guy", the party that has retainers for research, potential suit identification and preparation, not someone who might be accused. This forces smaller parties to invest at least some of their resources in "CYA" rather than doing what they are built to do (make products, for example).
3. It could affect supply of attorneys available to take a case or their fees. Say you feel there's a good chance of beating a wealthy litigant, so you charge more and misjudge? Or you don't feel you could be paid by the opposing party? Grant it, this likely cuts both ways. In the case of patent trolls, it might be beneficial, but perhaps not in others?
While the English rule does increase the risk of a lawsuit for the plaintiff, it ALSO increases the risk for the defendant by the same amount; both sides face the possibility of having to pay the opponents legal fees.
While the defendant in a patent lawsuit might feel they have an airtight case, it is never certain what will happen in a courtroom. You might lose and need to pay the damages PLUS attorney's fees for the plaintiff.
I'm surprised this logic still works. You'd think settling with a troll would put you on the short list for other trolls as an easy mark. The approval system for patents is so broken now, I'd practically expect multiple overlapping grants covering the same "feature" to exist.
You can settle with one troll and still keep your business, but not a non-stop stream of them. At least when the mafia extorted you for "protection" they wouldn't let anyone else muscle in on their turf.
Extortion is a common practice in the DoJ and law enforcement agencies. It is corrupt when the agents participate in a manner where they look to gain for some personal benefit.
The FBI could say, "rat on so and so and we will decrease your sentence by X, otherwise we will push for full sentence" and happens all the time.
But, if FBI said, "give us the password to Bitcoin wallet or you get decades in jail under retarded computer law" and the agent transfers Bitcoin to his offshore account, that is illegal.
One of the beauties of a niche site like Newegg is that they actually understand which products are interchangeable or related.
If I search for USB splitter by price on Amazon, I'm going to get flash drive cases, then USB cables, then flash drives, then I'll get into splitters. Newegg knows I didn't mean that, and that "products like this" shouldn't include everything with a USB connector on one end.
That's a great point, I never thought of searching for accessories on Newegg... even if I end up buying elsewhere, their accessory/peripheral search has always been one of the best on the internet for a long time.
I only noticed it when I tried Amazon and got slammed with a hundred pages of "it has a similar name!" matches. You can buy a laptop there fine, but peripherals and internals just aren't arranged in any coherent way.
I'm not sure what Newegg is doing (apart from specializing), but it works damn well.
I'd forgotten about his role in that case. It makes me admire him even more for standing by his principles that racial origin should not be a factor in determining college admissions. Does his argument that Asian Americans should not be discriminated against by state universities also bother you?
This is why I buy exclusively from Newegg. You can get things marginally cheaper on Amazon, but you are feeding the patent troll fighting machine when you buy from Newegg. And the costs aren't hugely more than other places. It's a few bucks here and there, and I think probably the most important few bucks people like us could spend when buying new hardware.
I like --> "Execution is the most critical element to success."
time and time again in high stress environments I see that there are people able to continuously execute and implement and those who tend to freeze or request help.
I think thriving under pressure is critical as well.
> You look in contrast everybody who is basically going “mine, mine, mine”. Look at those companies, they are laying people off all the time. They are on the down slope of their corporate cycle. Some of them are huge multi-billion dollar companies but innovation is not coming out of them.
A lot of smaller startups seem to fit this description. I wonder which large companies he has in mind though. He named Alcatel as one, I guess. Maybe AT&T as well? IBM? Oracle? I don't know. Oracle is making a ton of cash.
To do what exactly? The federal government created this problem with its asinine patent policies over the past few decades. Do you think all three branches of government will suddenly overhaul this because its upsetting some people in technology? Think of all the lobbying that makes sure this doesn't happen. I also think companies like Google, Apple, and MS play up the "evil patent" narrative but privately like the power their own patent portfolios have over competitors. Either as a defensive tactic or, sometimes, as an offensive one. These companies have also written the "Litigation will cost this much" letter against others many, many times. They're not against the patent system because it works in their favor almost exclusively. The exception are these patent trolls, which usually get shot down in court or get settled for a fee that's very affordable to big players. In fact, I'd go as so far to say that a lot of the press and "grassroots" anger towards patent trolls come via these companies' PR departments. They hate patent trolls but they do not want to give up on their own patent abuses and want to indoctrinate you into that belief system (Google/MS/Apple patents good, everyone else bad).
I can't see any realistic reform here. Its not even an issue in this or the past few elections. I suspect this is going to be the status quo for a very long time. The system as-is serves big companies and the government.
I agree change is not coming in the political front. Lobbying power defending the patent status quo is enormous, and reviewing Patent Law isn't in any political agendas.
Big tech companies take advantage of the system. Microsoft has made billions of dollars out of licensing Android related patents, Apple applied for a paper bag patent recently and Google has "patent parties" when (as I have been told by Google friends) they encourage engineers to work with attorneys in filing patents on anything they worked on that could be patentable.
To some extent, it has happened. Alice vs. CLS Bank killed a lot of software related patents. And post-grant administrative proceedings at the USPTO are killing patents at around an 85% rate for 1/10 the cost of a district court litigation.
